“The moment you meet BB-8, you build up some form of weird human connection,” says Marco Grob, who photographed the new Star Wars character for this week’s TIME cover. “It has one eye that has this really cute way of looking at you. It’s just incredible.”

“For me, Star Wars is much more than only a film,” Grob says. “Star Wars is hundreds of people who try to push the envelope. People who take enormous risks in creative and in technical aspects. They try to do things we’ve never seen before in a way nobody would have imagined to ever see before. And for me, it’s incredible.”